Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.
You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.
In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
The end of exile is the end of being.
Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.
There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.
The kind of power mothers have is enormous. Take the skyline of Istanbul – enormous breasts, pathetic little willies, a final revenge on Islam. I was so scared I had to crouch in the bottom of the boat when I saw it.
He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor’s on the very day.
A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.
The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.
At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.
A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.
Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.
It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.
A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.